I take that as a compelling recommendation for Signal.

Despite the fixes, theft claims for the affected Hyundai and Kia models continue to exceed industry norms, including for vehicles equipped with the upgraded software, according to HLDI. One reason could be that the software-based immobilizer only activates if the driver remembers to lock the vehicle with a fob, while many people are in the habit of using the switch on the door handle.

If ever there were a problem that is ripe for fixing with the first version of the software upgrade, not a future one, this was it.

We’ve all had nights like that.

Personally, I tend to buy something one to three years old so that it’s already dropped 10k off the new price, then run it for ten years or so until it starts getting unreliable then move on to the next one. It then costs me about 3k to 4k a year to have a car with no problems at all. I honestly don’t know when my electric car will start to get unreliable, but I’m not going back to noisy, smelly and slow ever, I’m sticking with quiet, clean and fast and never using a petrol station again in my life. My partner was a bit more sceptical at first but has very much come round and in a few years we’ll be a two EV household.

Yes. The person I was replying to thought it was somehow bad for the battery to outlast the car. I was making the point that that’s fine. In response to your point about the cost of an engine, I should say that batteries are a far bigger part of the cost of an electric car - it’s really just not very complicated apart from that - very few moving parts indeed compared to a combustion engine. That’s why the car companies aren’t very keen - unless they make their own batteries, they’re not adding as much value when they manufacture them. They prefer to push the hybrids which have the complexity of both and a lot less battery capacity (but very much don’t have the advantages of both for the driver).

Well the original model Nissan Leaf has been available in the UK since about early 2011, which is more like 13.5 years than 11, and I did a quick search for the 2017 Nissan LEAF on more than 100k miles on autotrader and only one of them had lost any battery capacity at all, and it had over 90%. Another one had 120k miles on the clock and was still at 100% battery capacity. You can mistreat a car and it won’t last as long, yes, but it really is the older model that has the common battery problems. The new ones don’t. And there are brands that have much better battery care than the Leafs, with active cooling etc.

You see, the reason we know they’re lasting longer is, you know, science and math, where they measure stuff and do the sums, and given that the old type of battery declined a lot in the first 8 years and the new type isn’t declining, then all you’ve got left on your hands at the end is just an awful lot of FUD about battery life peddled by an awful lot of people who don’t actually know.

When did you last lose a car to engine failure? Electronics, gears, suspension, stuff like that, but not the engine. They have to over engineer the battery because the earlier popular electric cars had bad batteries and they have to over-compensate. Hence today’s batteries.

Battery replacement after ten years is for very old EVs shrub much shorter range. The old model Nissan Leaf is what makes these stories. More recent cars have already outlasted the usage that the old pretty bad ones had by a significant amount. Your criticism is like saying you don’t want a mobile phone because the buttons are so fiddly.

I think you’re talking about batteries from nearly 15 years ago, which did degrade significantly with age and/or use. There has been a significant and noticeable improvement since then. The person you were taking to did say today’s batteries.

I feel like you missed the point. The point is that you probably want to stop every few hours anyway so there’s not a lot of point getting a PHEV. You’re buying two engines for the price of two, with the maintenance costs of a gas engine (higher) and extra weight. It’s just fear that gets people to buy PHEV. There’s hardly any mpg benefit over a gas car in real world usage, and there’s hardly any of the lively acceleration of a proper EV. No fun, no cost savings, just all initial expense. Get an EV or stick with your old gas car, PHEV is absolutely not the best of both.

Google never had any intention whatsoever of prioritising your privacy over their advertising revenue. This technology was 100% designed to shut other operators out of the tracking and advertising market and 0% to reduce their ability to track you and advertise to you. Never in a million years were they going to spend a lot of time, effort and money destroying the source of their money. Hobble competitors, yes. Hobble themselves? Never. Not even a little bit.

I’ve got bad news for you. I found out that if you fill in the survey it still comes back on every click.

UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.

Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.

UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.

What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.

Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.

Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.

Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.

The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.

There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.

In a discussion about whether null should exist at all, and what might be better, saying that Optional values aren’t available in languages with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s isn’t a strong point in my view.

The key point is that if your type system genuinely knows reliably whether something has a value or not, then your compiler can prevent every single runtime null exception from occurring by making sure it’s handled at some stage and tracking it for you until it is.

The problem with null is that it is pervasive - any value can be null, and you can check for it and handle it, but other parts of your code can’t tell whether that value can or can’t be null. Tracking potential nulls is in the memory of the programmer instead of deduced by the compiler, and checking for nulls everywhere is tedious and slow, so no one does that. Hence null bugs are everywhere.

Tony Hoare, an otherwise brilliant computer scientist, called it his billion dollar mistake a decade or two ago.

Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.

Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.

Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.

Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.

Please know that you are precious as you are.